Skate Park City

It was with an intrigued sense of reserve that I opened the airmail box and plucked out Skate Park City, the new title from Zeroscale Development and published by Midas Interactive, who I may mention as the publishers who broke my heart after ordering what should have been a fantastic game in the form of “Robot Warlords”.  Another time, another tear.  Ahem.

Featuring some very budget cover art, I stopped baulking at the possibly of the game itself being of similar dubious quality, adjusted my codpiece and got on with it.  And to one’s utter surprise, the original review by PocketGamer.co.uk turned out to be spot on.  

Skate Park City plays like Tony Hawk, dresses and acts like Jet Set Radio, but manages to inhabit a world of its own by expanding on both these franchises by adding a ridiculous amount of content, a grapple laser that lets you target flying drones and passing vehicles and launch towards them at high speed, incredibly large maps and collectibles to the hilt.  “Budget Title” isn’t so much the applicable nomenclature for SPC, as it is rather fully-featured and not skimping in any area I’ve seen yet.  

The player can choose from an initial two characters, with a total of six to unlock via medal tallies.  The single player gameworld consists of a tutorial section, with a subsequent five maps to complete.  I’m only on the first map, Old Downtown, but there are a hundred medals per main map, with forty-seven per sub-map.  This should satisfy those looking for something they can sink their teeth into that isn’t composed of hunting monsters or experiencing afternoons of darkness.  

The player sets off to complete objective-based missions around the map, and each mission is varied and fun.  The first mission after the tutorial has you grinding in specific ways along railings to put out fires.  After that, the player finds themselves tearing down posters via wall-riding over them.  Once the laser grapple is unlocked, the game becomes much more vibrant, as zipping around the map via latching onto vehicles or overhead drones, which you can pilot like some sort of Marty McFly hoverboard, becomes second nature.  This doesn’t mean skating takes second place, as there is a cumulative points system for every single trick you pull off.  The Old Downtown level has great design, which stands to reason for a skating game, and allows for some really long-running combo creation.  Grinding along rooftop wires, overpass railings, gutters and walls is wonderful fun and features an easy-going non-inertial based physics system that allows you keep grinding on and on.  This might sound a bit strange for those looking for something a little more Tony Hawk-esque, but it gels wonderfully with the way the game wants to be played - leaping from railing to rooftop to vehicle to drone, pulling off tricks and combos so that an entire run around the city is one long chain of point-scoring awesomeness.  It is here that the true connection to JSR is seen.  What combo-chaining does is build up the adrenalin meter, which opens up the opportunity to do special tricks such as flips, not to mention increase your speed exponentially.

Controls are easy and intuitive.  X provides the ever-present jump, held in causes a speed-up and creates a higher jump once released.  Square and Circle provide kick tricks and grab tricks respectively, with differing forms of said tricks being performed in conjunction with an analog nub direction.  Triangle performs an “Acid Drop In”, whereby pressing it allows for the player to drop into any pipe or half-pipe they happen to be leaping over.  R provides a number of functions; it provides a bail-out move that avoids kissing the concrete after a failed trick, it also triggers grinding near anything grind-worthy.  Coupled with directional adjustment, the R trigger allows for half-pipe lip tricks, such as hand-plants and balancing.  The L trigger is associated with the grapple laser, and held in, it scans for the nearest possible lock-on or, with a slight adjustment via the analog nub, you can aim it wherever you please.  

Graphics themselves are clean and efficient, whilst not being groundbreaking.  SPC does not have the level of graphical prowess of JSR, nor the cel-shading.  It does however feature a bright and bouncy world that has no pop-in, a decent draw-distance and good textures.  The character models themselves are, for lack of a better word, bordering on generic, but considering the player sees the back of them for the entire time of actual playing, it matters little.  What matters is a consistent framerate, which the game has.  Large open spaces with all manner of rails, billboards, traffic, robot birds (?!), drones, trains are slotted into the gameworld with technical hitches not going past the odd rip between textures  occasionally occurring.  The camera features a tight-lock on the player, which never allows for wandering or clunkiness.  

The sound design is catchy, funky and eclectic.  From slap bass-driven funk to guitar riff-laden tunes to scratched-up hip-hop and breaks odysseys, it seems to have a decent selection and a level of surprising quality.  Not much can be said about the ingame SFX, as it features the same skateboard wheel rolling we’ve heard since Tony Hawk and prior.  I’ve found myself turning the SFX to halfway and the music to full, simply because the music shines.  

I’ve yet to try the online component of SPC, but it features two to four player ad-hoc and infrastructure multiplayer, each with ten different modes.  The modes are as follows:

 - Freeplay - allows for a free skate around a chosen level with no time nor objective.
 - Checkpoint Race - a checkpoint-based race coupled with adrenalin-garnering tricks.
 - Boost Drone Race - an aerial race aboard the hoverdrones through the city skyline.
 - Combo King - A face-off of skill between opponents, each going for the highest score possible.
 - Trick DJ - Players are assigned random tricks to perform, each must complete the trick before their opponent does.
 - Shopping - By racking up points via tricks, the player must buy as many items as possible.
 - Crash Time - An arena of destruction whereby players must destroy as many stacks of boxes as possible.
 - Deathmatch - Players attack each other using power-ups and the jump-slam mechanic.
 - Beat ‘Em Up - The objective is to destroy more enemy robots than the opposition.
 - Catch Fireflies - Timing is the key to catch as many of the wily insects as the player possibly can.

SPC is also gameshare compatible, allowing for a multiplayer demo to be shared with another PSP.

In summary, Skate Park City is an underdog winner, a conquest of smart game design and voluminous content.  Great controls, a silly light-hearted story and surprising production values for such a small release.  9/10.